The Long View

11 brief tips for keeping your brain young

Change and speed are two the hallmarks of our knowledge society. Information abundance and creative decision making are two more.

Many feel overwhelmed - their brains register and react to the sense of helplessness and, bingo, here comes the killer: stress.

The good news though, comes from an ever growing volume of brain research (talk of recursive discourse - the brain researching the brain): we can train our brains to cope with new information and contexts and keep it fresh until old age. We continue to learn until our last day, so to speak.

Here are 11 tips that will help you keep your brain in shape:

1. Learn to love change. We are inherently resistant to change. The law of inertia also applies to our brains. But this creates a stressful paradox: Change is here to stay - and so you might as well make the best of it, in small and big ways. While our beloved little routines keep us going, they also dull our adaptability and resilience. Resilience has been shown to be one of the core success factors for our century. So: deliberately build change into your daily routines: changing your route to work, reading a different paper, storing your cups, plates and clothes in different places all make for eye opening and sometimes amusing surprises.
2. Get some physical exercise. Yes, that old chestnut. Enough said. Just do it.
3. Watch your diet. Rubbish in, rubbish out. What works for databases applies also to our bodies and our brains.
4. Meditate. There are many different forms of meditation, and they all help in different ways to keep the brain alert. Sitting still does wonders for the brain. It is not because you don't do anything that you are not doing anything.
5. Listen to music, and, even better, play it. There has been a lot written on the stimulating effects of Mozart's music on children's brains. It works for adults, as well. And if you don't like Mozart, there are many other composers to chose from.
6. Eat your porridge and your broccoli. I know. But they are good for you. Porridge has the virtue of providing the right nutrients for the brain and releasing them slowly into the system. Broccoli increases the ability to learn and helps protect existing and new nerve cells.
7. Regularly go on training programs. For adults there are essentially two kinds of learning: Perfecting your knowledge in a field or area you already know or entering a completely new field. The second is a lot more difficult for the ego (a beginner again…) but also for the brain: progress will take longer. Yet it will expose you to new perspectives and ways of thinking, including a new vocabulary. This will create new synaptic connections. Connections are good, in fact they are the drivers for keeping the brain young.
8. Adopt a creative pastime or five. Origami, dancing, painting, flower arranging, chess, Go, photography, writing, problem solving exercises… whatever floats your boat. More synaptic connections.
9. Meet new people. Many of us feel a slight sense of unease when meeting new people. That is because the brain has to adjust to the new context and the surprise factors related to the behaviour that unfamiliar people may display. Not to worry though - it's the same for them.
10. Keep a check your level and ability of multitasking. The jury is out on whether it is good or bad for you. On the upside, the brain can learn to handle more things at the same time; on the downside, the more interruptions we get, the less we get one task done. So if you feel that you get too many interruptions, create interruption-free blocks of time. Your brain will breathe. If you feel that chatting, texting, emailing and generally being in touch enhances your creativity - go for it.
11. Kill the sleep killers. Sleep, and the dreams that come with it, carries a vital restorative power for the brain. No sleep, no creativity, no brain training. And I am not talking about the odd work-through-the-night sleep deprivation to finish a project, but of the regular sleep disturbances many of us experience today.

Brain stimulation has to do with creativity, and creativity with brain stimulation. In our world of total interconnectedness, tender love and care for our brains matters. Nurturing, replicating, maintaining and enhancing our beloved synapses is a prerequisite for more open minded, balanced and satisfying life until the end.

And, in the process, for a more interesting world.

The price of sleeplessness

The Center for Medicine in the Public Interest publishd a study on sleeplessness (in the US - but looking around me on any regular Monday morning, the findings no doubt apply in Europe as well…)

A couple of facts from the study:

• 70 million Americans suffer form insomnia in one way or another
• Cost to the healthcare system and economy: about $42 billion per year
• Insomnia sufferers tend to take twice as many sick days per year
• Cost to employers: up to 4.4 days pf wages per untreated employee in a six-month period (so in effect 8.8 days per year - or about 3.5% of his basic wage costs).

Main causes:

• Lifestyle (smoking, coffee, alcohol, erratic sleep schedules, shift working)
• Environmental factors (noise, light, temperature)
• Anxiety (the 4.00am wake up call that comes from nowhere)
• Medical, psychological, genetic factors.

Needless to say, beyond the costs mentioned above, there are other often less tangible impacts: loss of productivity, tension, accidents, 

Remedies? No surprises there, so take your pick:

• Lifestyle changes
• Avoiding stimulants
• Regular sleep schedules
• Medication… of all sorts
• Exercise (but not too late in the day).

Sleepless, not just in Seattle.

Ever heard of WILB?

A study by the University of Melbourne reveals that WILB can be a productivity booster.

WILB is Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing.

The study, which is also available as video and audio downloads shows some intriguing facts:

70% of Internet users engage in WILB. This increases their productivity by an average of 9%, as long as they spend less than 20% o their time on the net. 

The increase in productivity is attributed to the brain's need for a rest after about 20 minutes' concentration. (When did you last doze off last during a long presentation?). Then, refreshed and restored, it can take up a full workload again.

However, don't use the argument to justify your Internet addiction: too much time online has the adverse affect and kills productivity. A new Internet Addiction Center opened specifically for this purpose. Check if you already got it: Internet addiction creates irritability and stops you from taking breaks when the time is right…

Nice excuse, though.

Bring in the creatives!

We humans have funny thought patterns.

Just when we thought we had it all figured out with our superiour rational brains, just when we thought we had understood the world, evolution, and the galaxies, just when we thought we had reached the end of history (sort of after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in the early nineties), it got all muddled up again.

What seemed simple, clear and, possibly somewhat boring, broke apart and fragmented into millions and millions of inscrutable nano-parts, uncountable amounts of gigabytes and seemingly endless strands of sequenced genomes.

We thought that we were on top of the world, and the horizons receded into the farthest distance. We thought we were pulling the strings of history and are now beginning to realise that there are far too many of them.

To make sense of it all, we need to, and have always needed to, tell ourselves stories. In that sense, in spite of the dialectic waltz we have been dancing, nothing has changed since the dawn of time:

1. The ancient peoples told stories of gods and how they created the world, our destinies and the weather.

2. Then, collectively, we decided to take destiny into our own hands and demystify the universe. Renaissance man and his descendants told the story of the superiority of rational man. It created the modern world with its industries, its technologies and its pollution. 

3. More and more signs point into the direction that we have now entered (or are at the brink of) a new era, or should I say of an infinite number of new eras, where the collective story telling takes on a completely different life - one of tis own: it will be non-linear, pattern based, non hierarchical, multi-cultural, and not least, utterly unpredictable.

This will go against the grain of the our recent left-brain mechanistic generations. But after the reductionist (and, lets face it, highly effective in construction and destruction alike) last five centuries, the realities, complexities and challenges of our world(s) demand a thoroughly improved set of tools.

In comes the right brain. In comes the web paradigm. In comes creativity as an asset and not something reserved to a bunch of quirky eccentrics.

Artistry takes on an entirely new meaning: it's the multidimensional expansion of multiple intelligences, spurned on by rapid technological advances and possibilities. 

Welcome to the business man as artist.

The eternal quest for motivation

When I work with my coachees, we often have long conversations around what motivates them at work. When I work with managers, we have the same conversations, in particular around how they can motivate their staff. 

My general view is that one cannot motivate people; you can only bring people to motivate themselves.

Motivation is a strong emotion inside that makes us do stuff because we want to do it: so the only effective way of motivation is self-motivation. Hence the limited effectiveness of rewards in the work environment: they will work well for some tasks and contexts (repetitive, left brain environments, but much less for others (right brain, creative contexts).

Sam Glucksberg did some extensive research around intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. The following video with Daniel Pink explains the differences beautifully, and, crucially, with a good sense of humour.

BN Quote of the week

"Only those who constantly retool themselves stand a chance of staying employed in the years ahead."

Tom Peters

->: What are you doing to stay ahead?

Creativity killers

Don sends me the link to this video.

It is a 20 minute exceptional TED talk by Sir Ken Robinson. A refreshing interpretation on how our school systems (worldwide) reflect the needs of 19th century industrial societies for left-hand brain power. 

Time to move on, says Sir Ken. Time to invent new education paradigms more in line with our current and future realities. Time to let flourish the artist in everyone.

The film is short, it is poignant, and it is also very funny.

And then, Peter Drucker said:

• Do first things first, and second things not at all.
• The average executive hires incorrectly 2/3 of the time.
• What you have to do and the way you have to do it is incredibly simple. Whether you are willing to do it , is another matter.
• Wherever you see a successful business, someone made a courageous decision.
• Every success creates new opportunities, and so does every failure.
• Communication is what the listener does.

They speak for themselves, really. 

The Socrates of modern management thinking

Peter F. Drucker spent his 70-odd year career teaching, consulting, writing and asking questions. Fundamental questions to guide managers in the awareness of their responsibilities and the execution of their tasks. Having had virtually no hands-on management experience himself, he prided himself that he was helping people to find out people what to do, yet not how to do it.

When Peter Drucker began his work in the thirties, management as a discipline was virtually unknown. 

Many of the business concepts we talk about today (and so often take for granted) can be traced back to Peter Drucker. Management was not a worthy subject of study in the first half of the century. At the start of his career, he found it extremely difficult to find books on management... so he wrote a few himself (about 40 of them).

Common modern business concepts and practices, like management by objectives, management by walking around, empowerment, people as an asset not a cost, doing the right things, leadership by example and countless others are all described, generally for the first time, in Drucker's writings.

In 1981, when Jack Welch (CEO and Chairman of GE, Forbes CEO of the Century) began his mission at the helm of GE, he went to see Peter Drucker for advice on running the conglomerate. He came away with only two questions. Yet those two questions were going to define everything he did in the following 20 years until his retirement in 2001:

1. If you were not already in the business you are in, would you enter it today?
2. What are you going to do about it? 

Whereupon Welch set off to sell hundreds of businesses of the GE Empire, restructuring, redefining and strengthening the organisation to 25 times its value.

And this is how Drucker described himself:

"My greatest strength as a consultant is to be ignorant and ask a few questions."

To me, that sounds eerily like what a certain Socrates said two and a half thousand years ago.

Thinking space

Been to Brittany for a week, airing my rusty brain cells. Putting things into perspective. Planning for the next months. Reading about Peter Drucker (more later). And taking a few pictures.